


no one's here to sleep

by firstliner



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Hunters, Alternate Universe - Witchcraft, Boston Bruins, M/M, Magical Realism, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-27 16:49:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20049334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstliner/pseuds/firstliner
Summary: “I hate ghouls,” Brad mutters.Tuukka shrugs. “I’ll take ghouls over demons any day. Exorcisms are the worst.”“You just don’t like Latin.”“It’s a horrible language. Why can’t spirits just learn Finnish?”





	no one's here to sleep

**Author's Note:**

> Bergy's nickname is Saint Patrice, y'all. This fic basically wrote itself.
> 
> In all seriousness, this is my first time writing a multichapter fic, so bear with me as I get the updates out! I have everything outlined but it's the actual writing part that gets me...
> 
> Anyway, hope you enjoy!

The black blood is sticky on Brad’s hands.

With a grimace, he wipes as much as he can onto his jeans; they’re already a long lost cause.

The ghoul collapsed in front of him looks so harmless, almost human in death—pale and grey and deathly thin. As if it hadn’t just been trying to gouge Brad’s eyes out with its fingernails.

“I hate ghouls,” Brad mutters.

Tuukka shrugs. “I’ll take ghouls over demons any day. Exorcisms are the worst.”

“You just don’t like Latin.”

“It’s a horrible language. Why can’t spirits just learn Finnish?”

Brad snorts. He reaches down and hefts the creature into a bridal carry. “Do you wanna grab the head?”

Tuukka does, and the two make their way back to Brad’s car with the body in tow.

///

“That’s the third ghoul in the past week,” Torey says with a frown.

The funeral parlor on the outskirts of Boston is deserted at this time of night, but the hunter-mortician keeps an emergency phone on hand for cases like this.

“Yeah,” Brad says. “Tourist season, I guess. Even ghouls can’t resist the draw of Boston in autumn.”

Tuukka rolls his eyes and Torey’s frown deepens. The crematory door clinks as it opens and Torey helps Brad slide the body in.

“You should check with Zee. He might have some insights. Let him know, at least, and he can have his hunters keep an eye out.”

Brad groans. “I hate going to the Garden. It’s so…stuffy.”

It’s Torey’s turn to roll his eyes. “It’d be so much easier if you just joined, you know. The library alone is worth it.”

“Who needs a library when you have the internet?” Brad counters.

“Yeah, like the internet has generations of hunters’ journals just available for the public.”

“I don’t need generations of hunters’ journals to know how to kill a ghoul,” Brad mutters.

“Okay, but maybe one of them has some idea why there’s been an uptick in them recently,” Torey retorts.

Brad scowls. “I hate it when you make sense.”

Torey shrugs. “Take Tuukka with you. Then you’ll have a backup at least.”

“Hey, wait, don’t bring me into this,” Tuukka interjects.

“Tuukk,” Brad whines, turning on him. “I’ll owe you one. I’ll… I’ll take your next exorcism.”

Tuukka pauses to contemplate this. “Next three exorcisms.”

“Two.”

“Deal.”

///

The Garden—the Conclave’s New England headquarters—is a sprawling church complex on the South Shore. The main cathedral actually does hold Sunday service, but the basement and the rest of the buildings house barracks, an armory, a library, and however many of Chara’s hunters are in Boston at the time.

Brad has to admit, it’s a beautiful construction—all dark stone, brilliantly jewel-toned stained glass, and surrounded by the vibrant flora that gives the place its name—but it also has a chill to it that Brad can never quite shake.

“Bradley. Tuukka. It’s good to see you. It’s been a while,” Chara says, holding his hand out for Brad, then Tuukka to shake.

“Yeah, uh, we’ve been busy. With, you know, hunting,” Brad replies awkwardly.

Chara just smiles. “That’s good to hear. Can I get you anything to eat or drink? I was just about to head to lunch.”

“No thanks,” Brad says.

“A water would be great,” Tuukka says at the exact same time.

“Sure. Come with me,” Chara says and motions for them to follow.

Once Chara’s back is turned and he’s taken a few steps away, Brad turns to give Tuukka a death glare.

“What, I’m thirsty,” Tuukka says with a shrug.

“Couldn’t you wait for like twenty minutes?” Brad hisses. He’d wanted to keep their visit as short and sweet as possible—he _certainly_ hadn’t wanted to linger over food and drinks.

Tuukka just shrugs and starts to head after Chara.

It’s not that Brad has anything against _Chara_, per se. Hell, he’d even go so far as to say Chara is a pretty cool dude. It’s more just the idea of the Conclave that gets to him. He’s never exactly been good at following orders and yeah, it might have been good to have a whole network of hunters that would have his back, but he and Tuukka make a pretty solid team so why would he need anyone else in the first place, right?

He pointedly ignores the fact that he sleeps with one eye open, both a knife and gun under his pillow, and a ring of salt around his bed whenever Tuukka goes back to Finland. Call him paranoid, but he’s made it this far. Even without Tuukka, he can protect himself. He’s been doing it his whole life.

Chara leads them from the church proper through a hallway to one of the other buildings towards what turns out to be the kitchen. A handful of people are loitering in the kitchen's breakfast nook and they all stare at Brad and Tuukka as they walk in. Brad gives them a tight nod before shifting his attention back to Chara, who has begun to take the fixings out of the fridge to build himself a sandwich.

First, though, he grabs a glass from the cupboard above the counter, fills it with water from the dispenser on the front of the fridge, and slides it across the granite island to Tuukka.

“Now,” Chara says, turning back to his bread, lettuce, tomatoes, and vegan bacon. “What can I help you with?”

“Um,” Brad begins eloquently. He clears his throat and tries again. “Have you had any troubles with ghouls recently?”

Chara tilts his head as he cuts his sandwich in half diagonally. “No more than usual. A team ran across one a few days ago I believe. Why do you ask?”

“We’ve run across, like, three in seven days, which seems like way too many for the region.”

“Yeah, definitely more than I’ve ever come across,” Tuukka adds.

Chara looks contemplative. “Ghouls,” he murmurs to himself. He takes a bite of his sandwich and chews thoughtfully. “Well, I’ll send out some patrols to see if they can scout out anything else, maybe try to find out where they’re all coming from. I think Backes wrote some entries on ghouls in the area; it might be worth checking out his old notes.”

“Oh, um, okay, yeah,” Brad says, already dreading the idea of staying in the Garden even longer. He wonders if he could just find Chara’s second and ask him about the ghouls in person. That would probably be faster than the library...

“They should be in the library. You remember where that is?” Chara asks.

“For sure; out the hallway we came through, then two doors on the left,” Brad replies, his hopes of just asking Backes dashed at Chara’s words.

“That’s it. Let me know if you need anything else. And keep in touch; we don’t want this situation getting out of hand. Not so close to Halloween.”

Brad winces. He hadn’t even _thought_ about Halloween. Yeah, it’s a bit of a stereotype, but supernatural activity really does pick up around Halloween. It’s probably a coincidence, but it’s also probably because dumbass kids think it’s a _great_ idea to start summoning spirits and practicing with Ouija boards just for a laugh with their friends, often with unforeseen consequences that Brad ends up having to deal with. And Tuukka especially hates it, because it’s always demons that get summoned, so he gets even more irritable than usual.

Brad can see why Tuukka had been so easy to jump on accompanying him to the Garden; those exorcisms Brad had promised would probably be coming up sooner rather than later.

Tuukka drains the rest of his water before following Brad towards the library.

“That wasn’t so bad,” Tuukka says.

“We’re not done yet,” Brad replies, shooting Tuukka a significant look.

The library is empty save for a blond man sitting at one of the tables near the entrance. He glances up when Tuukka and Brad enter and smiles faintly.

He looks familiar… What’s his name again? Something weird…

“Danton,” Tuukka says in greeting. “How’s it been?”

_Danton_. Right. Weird. How the hell does Tuukka remember everyone’s name anyway?

“Hi, Tuukka,” Danton says with a small smile. “It’s been alright. Can I help you find something?”

“We’re looking for Backes’ journals? Chara said he had some with some info on ghouls in them,” Brad says.

“Oh, for sure, they’re right over here.”

Danton leads them through the shelves and selects three slim, nondescript journals from a shelf on the far wall. They look pretty much identical to all the other journals on the surrounding shelves and Brad has no idea how Danton tells them all apart.

“Thanks,” Brad says, forcing a smile as he accepts the books. “Mind if we hang out for a while?”

“Feel free. Let me know if you need anything else.”

“Will do.”

///

Brad skims through one journal and Tuukka skims through another. He takes notes on his phone and snaps pictures of particularly important pages. It’s mostly pretty standard info on the best ways to target ghouls—all stuff that Brad is familiar with thank you very much—but there is some info on a spike in ghouls about half a decade ago.

Brad slows as he flips through those pages.

“Hey, I think I found something,” he says and Tuukka sets his journal down.

“There was something similar that happened a while ago with the ghouls and stuff, and there was a coven that popped up in Providence right at the same time. That’s kind of an odd coincidence, no?”

Tuukka hums. “Yeah, that could definitely be something. Providence you said? Rhode Island?”

“Yeah. Looks like we’re going on a road trip.”

///

That night, Brad dreams of home.

It’s cold in Nova Scotia, even this early in autumn, but Brad doesn’t shiver despite the chill. His neighborhood is exactly how he remembers it; little red brick houses crammed together with hardly enough space for a patch of grass out front. There, at the end of the cul-de-sac, is the house he’d grown up in. It looks so…normal. Nothing like how it had looked the night Brad had left it and never looked back. There’s no neon crime scene tape, no blue-red-blue-red flashing lights.

Brad walks to the door and it creaks open before him. The smell of his dad’s meatloaf washes over him and Brad closes his eyes, overwhelmed. If he thinks hard enough, he can hear his dad clinking around in the kitchen.

Everything from the jackets on the coat rack to the array of family photos in the entry hall is exactly how Brad remembers it. He reaches up to touch one of the frames on the wall—the one with all of them from the trip to the beach they’d taken the summer after Brad’s third grade.

“Bradley.”

Brad’s shoulders tense up and his chest tightens. His voice is barely above a whisper. “Mom?”

He turns, expecting to see his mother’s smiling face, and instead finding a bloodbath.

His father is sprawled across the carpeted living room floor, blood pooling around his body so fast, too fast, and neck twisted at an angle that makes Brad’s stomach turn. His eyes are open, lifeless, and Brad falls to his knees. “Daddy?” he whispers, crawling towards him and reaching out to shake his shoulder. “Daddy, wake up.” His voice sounds younger, higher pitched.

Distantly he hears: “Put the knife down!” followed by three loud pops.

He squeezes his eyes shut and when he opens them again, he’s standing in the kitchen and looking into the living room. The scene is frozen. His father is there, lifeless on the ground, and younger Brad is crouching over him, blood slicked up to his elbows. Two steps behind younger Brad, his mother stands, wielding a bloody kitchen knife and advancing on his younger self. Brad can’t see it from this angle, but he knows her eyes are flat and solid black.

The cops—two men who couldn’t have been all that far out of the police academy but had seemed so much older back then—stand in front of the broken-in door, guns out and pointed at his mother. The one on the left has his finger on the trigger.

But just beside younger Bradley, positioned between him and his mother, there’s an odd shift in the shadows, a sort of wavering transparency, a trick of the light. Bradley’s eyes can’t quite catch on it, but there’s a twist in his chest when he tries to stare at it for too long.

He blinks again and it’s all over. The room is swarming with adults he doesn’t know—crime scene techs, detectives, police officers. Black plastic tarps cover the bodies on the ground. He knows if he goes outside, he’ll see his younger self being loaded into an ambulance, his entire upper body dripping with blood that is not his own.

Brad sees the waver of light again, that undefined thing that is there but not quite there, hovering near the fireplace.

If he didn’t know any better, he’d have sworn it was looking straight at him.

///

The drive down to Providence is uneventful.

Brad doesn’t mention his dream. He gets them sometimes, the especially vivid ones that leave him drained after a full night’s rest. Sometimes Brad exists in them, like the one he’d had the night before. Sometimes they’re like watching a movie. Sometimes they’re more like a feeling he gets that he can’t shake, flashing images and broken noises that Brad is left trying to piece together in the thin light of morning.

He tries not to think about them too much. He already has enough on his plate.

They pass the sign on the highway that welcomes then to Providence when Tuukka speaks.

“So. What do we know about the coven?”

Brad purses his lips and pulls out his phone. He skims through the notes he’d taken.

“Leader is a guy called David … Kredge-kee? K-R-E-J-C-I,” Brad starts, spelling out the unfamiliar surname. “They’ve kept pretty much under the radar since they popped up, but they’ve had a few mishaps with unruly witches using magic in public a few years back.” As he says it, Brad vaguely remembers that. Something about a witch who was fond of parties and had a tendency to perform “magic tricks” when intoxicated.

“Krejci,” Tuukka says, providing the correct pronunciation.

“Right. Krejci. Czech national, came over to the States to play hockey but shattered his knee a few years in and just decided to stay. Hockey’s a pretty violent sport; think he tried to take some of that energy off the ice?”

Tuukka hums as he thinks. “I guess we’ll see.”

///

The little motel they check into is seedy in every sense of the word.

Brad isn’t totally convinced there aren’t bedbugs hiding in the grimy mattress and the shower rattles perilously before spitting out a weak stream of metallic-smelling water. But it had been cheap, and it wasn’t like Brad was exactly rolling in cash.

They hang around Providence for the rest of the day, doing touristy things and eating dinner at a little spot overlooking the water.

It really is a quaint little city and Brad can see the appeal, but you’d have to drag Brad out of Boston kicking and screaming.

The evening is spent half watching some shitty sitcom reruns and half listening to their portable police scanner. The former is mind-numbing and the latter isn’t much better, until…

“A wild animal attack?” Brad says, perking up and fumbling for the remote to mute the TV.

Tuukka gives Brad a significant look. Wild animal attacks in and around cities are supernatural-related often enough that all were worth dipping in on.

Tuukka nods, gets to his feet, and grabs the car keys.

“Let’s check it out.”

///

They leave the car in a gas station parking lot and walk the rest of the way towards the flashing red-blue lights.

The crime scene ends up being on the border of a cemetery well within the city limits, which feels a bit on the nose, but it is one of the only places in a city with open space and some tree coverage.

They stick to the far end of the cemetery and it’s easy to stay hidden in the shadows that only deepen as the clock ticks closer to midnight. The moon is a sliver overhead.

Brad can see a tarp over what must have been the victim’s body. A trio of cops are talking to a pair of medics and no one seems to be paying any attention to what’s going on outside their little bubble of light and safety.

“Whataya think? Animal attack after all?” Brad murmurs. A twig crunches under his boot and he winces but no one glances up.

“In a cemetery in the middle of a city?” Tuukka replies under his breath. Brad can hear his eyes roll. “Think a coyote snuck down Main Street to take someone out in the middle of the night?”

“Hey, we’ve seen weirder,” Brad retorts.

Tuukka huffs out a breath of air. “Yeah. Fair.”

“So do you think—”

Before Brad has finished the sentence, there’s a blinding, all-encompassing pain at the back of his skull and then—

Nothing.

///

Brad is weightless in a soft dark place.

He could stay here forever, he thinks. He’s so, so tired. It would be so easy just to rest his eyes for a while…

Light—searing and golden—cuts a slash through the darkness and Brad gasps. He squeezes his eyes shut, and when he opens them again he’s standing on something solid. The ground is a grid of dove grey squares stretching out into the hazy forever distance and the sky above is flat and featureless and only a few shades paler.

There is a being standing in front of him made of an unknowable combination of light and a sort of shimmering twist of air. Though Brad tries to look directly at it, the piece of his brain that would process the sight of it doesn’t seem to be functioning.

“The world is not done with you, Bradley Marchand,” the light says, steady and resplendent.

For a heart-wrenching few seconds, Brad goes back to that soft dark place.

And then, he wakes up.

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos and comments keep me going :)


End file.
